Trapped inside an electronic arena, where love, and escape, do not compute! - Tron movie-poster tag-line.

Being and Event is strangely silent on the subject of computation; and yet in certain respects the “fundamental quasi-complete situation” (or “ground model”) introduced in meditation thirty-three significantly resembles a computer simulation: a situation “as close as possible…to the resources of ontology itself”, reflecting the axioms of set theory, and providing the basis for a speculation on the possible existence of an indiscernible.

In spite of its faithful reflection of the axioms, the evidence it provides for their veridicality, the chosen situation must not exhaust “the resources of ontology itself”; not only because the latter are by definition inexhaustible, but also because the model itself must be capable of supplementation by its “generic extension”. It is, so to speak, a text with an outside - albeit an outside that is produced via a kind of fancy diagonalization of its inside.

This closeness-in-separation is a defining characteristic of the simulacrum, which is both “realistic” to the extent that the laws defining “realism” are exactly modelled within it, and at the same time deficient in reality, falling short in some way. The simulacrum’s lack is what makes it usable as a tool of speculation: only a “quasi-complete” model is amenable to being extended in novel ways.

We must be careful here. Badiou is quite adamant that situations in general are not simulacra, false idealisations of some primary ontological mode of unstructured, inconsistent presence. Ontology is a situation: the presentation of presentation, by means of an axiom system. But the “ground model” or “fundamental quasi-complete situation” is not just any situation: it is a situation bearing a quite specific relationship (reflection, veridicality, lack or non-exhaustivity, basis for speculation) to the ontological situation. The world of the subject seized by a truth is an “as if” kind of world.

It is also notable that the diagonalization through which the generic extension is assembled is described as a procedure, a term which suggests computationality if not computability. That is, the procedure may not have a computable result, but carrying it out may be like doing computation - with no end in sight. It may not be possible to know in general whether a given procedure will terminate - after all, if we could know that, we could tell which truth procedures were really generic and infinite, and which were played out entirely within the repertoire of existing knowledge.

Now, the “fundamental quasi-complete situation” allows of two perspectives in Badiou’s account: that of “the ontologist”, for whom “there is…no doubt that a generic part of [the situation] exists”, and that of “an inhabitant of [the situation]” for whom it cannot exist, because it is not an element of the situation (“to be an element” is to be presented: the part, or subset, is never presented as such, unless it is also an element). The gap between these two perspectives marks a particular kind of finitude, that of intra-situational being.

What exists for the ontologist (in the sense of her possessing an indomitable conviction that it must exist) does not exist for the inhabitant (in the sense that it is not presented in the one-result of the inhabitant’s situation). It is solely through a wager on the truth of an event that the inhabitant can begin to verify such an existence, to “make the hypothesis of a Universe where this truth…will have completed its generic totalization”.

Nothing prevents the ontologist from also being an inhabitant of some situation: inhabitant and ontologist are not Man and God, and the ontologist’s knowledge of ontology does not grant her a God’s-eye view of the situation she inhabits. Neither, however, does the intra-situational finitude of the inhabitant prevent her from being able to reason axiomatically - that is, to do ontology, and to arrive at indomitable (if pragmatically vacant) certitudes thereby.

So - what about Tron, then? Well, in part ii) I will be pursuing the contention that the film presents, by means of the figure of the computer programmer’s excarnation into the digital world, a dramatisation of intra-situational finitude that resonates with a number of other of Badiou’s concerns (notably the excrescence of the State, in the form of the vampiric, anonymous thing-of-many-parts that is the MCP)…